Abolish XML Namespaces

Posted July 21, 2005 * Comments(2)

The Abolish XML Namespaces article is finally published at IBM DeveloperWorks. Here’s the abstract:

Experience shows XML namespaces can be a common cause of confusion and a major complicating factor in XML adoption. In this article, the author argues that XML namespaces do not offer a good solution for the problems they aim to solve, and are not needed for the majority of XML use cases in the real world. His recommendation is to deprecate namespaces or significantly curtail their usage. For cases that require namespaces, developers should use best practices and conventions to restrict the syntactical freedoms offered by the specification such that namespaces present a consistent face that’s easier to understand.

To answer frequently asked questions:
- Yes, that is me in a tux
- It’s from my wedding (circa 7 years ago)

Sidebar: The full length version of that picture, featuring myself in a lovely pose next to a tree, received quite a high ranking (somewhere in the 8s I think) on amIHotOrNot.com . Yes, it was posted on a dare. What can I say, I’m not only brilliant, but also a very attractive man.

It seems all my recent posts are complaints, so I’ll come up with some constructive things next.

2 Comments so far

  1. Global Spin: Tech on July 21st, 2005

    consider XML namespaces deprecated

    The adage goes: “XML is like violence: if it doesn’t solve your problem, you aren’t using enough of it.” Parand Darugar has challenged that idea (or validated the sarcasm) with a compelling case for abolishing XML namespaces. I never did…

  2. Carsten Saager on April 29th, 2006

    As namespaces can be a pain in the ass, there are indispensable sometimes.

    But most of the time they are simply overused, there I am with you. Sometimes it is like every node will be called “NODE” and prefixed by its private namespace. Namespaces are made for interoperability, ie collecting fragments from different sources where you don’t have any control on their origin – there you need namespaces to distinguish them properly later.

    The SOAP header is the perfect example of bad use. Nearly 400bytes each request just to repeat the same sermon of NS – this is what people drove away from XML-based webservices towards REST/JSON implementations, beacuse of a flexibiilty that almost nobody needs

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